Three Paths to Private Clouds with Cisco, EMC and VCE

Cisco Live 2012 has been another great opportunity to show the power of the partner ecosystem that Cisco built to provide compelling solutions to the IT organizations, interested in deploying a Unified Data Center, and a private cloud infrastructure.

I invited this week VCE Tom Chatham to blog about the collaboration between VCE, Cisco and EMC to support workload mobility and business continuance, and EMC Brian Gracely to write about VSPEX. But I also took advantage of the presence at Cisco Live of EMC Parmeet Chaddha VP Partner Solutions and VCE Jay Cuthrell, Office of the CTO, to invite them to a short video panel with Cisco Senior Director Data Center Cloud and Enterprise Solutions Shashi Kiran to talk about the different architectures that can simplify, automate and transform IT while helping customers accelerate the journey to cloud computing.

There is no doubt that the collaboration between our 3 companies over the past years has been very productive , and today this “triad ” is able to offer to the customers 3 clear options depending on their unique business IT needs:

Build Your Own—Solutions built using tested and proven products and services

Cisco and EMC offer best-of-breed, pre-tested products and a a full range of services to fit unique business and IT needs. These services are delivered through Cisco and EMC and their partners, and include design, deployment, optimization and management— as well as broader advanced services to plan, deploy and manage virtualized and private cloud environments.

Reference architecture

VSPEX provides a semi-converged infrastructure for customers looking to gain some of the benefits of converged infrastructures while at the same time gaining more choice in individual stack components by trading off unified management and support. Small and medium business customers face the challenge of managing IT infrastructures and ensuring application availability while not having the expertise or resources as the larger enterprises. Typically the IT staff are IT generalists rather than specialists. Server virtualization helps lower costs and increases availability, however it places new demands on the IT infrastructure and the depth of expertise required. As customers begin to embark on the journey to the cloud, they realize that they need a solution that takes advantage of their existing IT environment while cutting deployment times and reducing management requirements and risks. The solution should also be able to scale with their business. VSPEX is a modular infrastructure stack with a virtualization layer, server, network and storage that is pre-validated to deliver predictable performance. These pre-validated infrastructure stacks are based on highly advanced, flexible and efficient unified storage and next generation backup architecture. Combining this with a choice of server and network infrastructure, VSPEX offers customers the choice of Hypervisors for their deployment options. EMC’s integration with VMware and Hyper-V greatly simplify management. Flexible deployment options and pre-validations greatly reduce deployment time while support from wide and well-trained channel partners greatly reduce risk.

Integrated Stack

Vblock Infrastructure Platforms were developed to act as a converged infrastructure supporting the customer’s journey to the cloud. They provide a revolutionary approach to systems assembly. The VCE joint venture has assembled industry leading components from Cisco, VMware & EMC enabling the platforms to be delivered as a system while VCE provides lifecycle support performing ongoing testing, certification and integration work to ensure that over the life of the infrastructure investment, the platform is operating with up to date software and VCE is ensuring cross functional integration

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